usability testing of the Drupal administrative interface

University of Baltimore

May 2008

we are: graduate students in the Interaction Design and Information Architecture program at the University of Baltimore and we: performed the second round of testing of the Drupal administrative interface

testing took place at UB’s User Research Lab

who’d we bring in?

career or hobbyist web developers

experienced in various content management systems (RedDot, SiteExecutive, WordPress, Joomla and others)

but with no Drupal experience

and we asked them to get a website started for a small non-profit by:

creating content

creating navigation (i.e., primary links)

and setting up a user account for board members

we used a pre- and post-test questionnaire to get participant opinions before and after using Drupal,

collected gaze data with the Tobii eyetracker,

and asked lots of questions

afterwards we analyzed the tapes for usability patterns across

participants

so, why go through the trouble?

the Drupal mission statement: By building on relevant standards and open source technologies, Drupal supports and

enhances the potential of the Internet as a medium where diverse and geographically-

separated individuals and groups can collectively produce, discuss, and share

information and ideas. With a central interest in and focus on communities and collaboration,

Drupal's flexibility allows the collaborative production of online information systems and

communities.

who are these people, and does playing with Drupal encourage them to become a Drupal user?

diverse and geographically-separated individuals and groups can collectively produce, discuss, and share

information and ideas

who wants to read a manual?

“I’m not sure what nodes are at this point because I didn’t read the manual, obviously, as I never do, I just install it out of the box and pretend that everything is going to be fine.”

- - Participant 1

no one.

people want to produce, discuss, and share information and ideas

and Drupal has user experience goals to try and achieve this

developers: well-tooled with a system of hooks that provide ready means to accomplish most foreseeable coding aims that involve interaction with core elements

administrators: easy to install and set up so that there is a minimum requirement for specific technical expertise, intuitive and self-explanatory so that administrators can easily find the configuration options they need and highly configurable so that site administrators can present just the interface they wish

users: intuitive and self-explanatory so that users with minimal prior experience can easily discover, navigate, and use functionality, uncluttered so that users are not faced with a difficult task of sorting the essential from the non-essential

Drupal enables people around the globe to create powerful websites

and has some successes in the admin interface, like:

participants liked the welcome page (despite some inconsistencies between

the contextual links and the admin menu)

and all easily located and used the Create content link

but we did find some problems

everyone expected a WYSIWYG and searched for formatting options

(modules were not considered by any participants)

participants didn’t get page and story, and spent a lot of time thinking about it

the parent item was not what they expected

and more, such as:

• confusion over the term primary link,

• locating content after creating it,

• finding the link they need on the Administer page, and

• not noticing Garland default theme primary links most often until they moved on to the next task

to meet Drupal user experience goals, creative solutions to these

problems must be found

but wait…

overall, the major challenge for all participants was that they didn't get that

the administrative menu overlays the website itself – leading to questions like:

where's my home page?

how do I preview pages?

…and see the structure of the site?

how do I see the difference between the CMS and the website I'm making?

this misunderstanding was the root of a lot of the problems, confusion

and frustration

“Nope, can't do it.” P3

“I have no hope that I am anywhere close.” P3

“I don't understand what this does at all...” P1

“Huh. That's crazy.” P2

3 of our suggestions: • find ways in which to visually distinguish the

administrative menu and pages, and incorporate the style into the default Drupal theme

• surface more of the content hidden under drop-downs within node forms and in the primary navigation menu (for example, add a “manage content” link)

• use more consistent, intuitive labeling for basic tasks

Becca Scollan, Abby Byrnes, Malia Nagle, Paul Coyle, Cynthia York, Maleka Ingram

Interaction Design & Information Architecture, University

of Baltimore

May, 2008